Ars revisits Aperture to take a another look at workflow and RAW image …

Introduction

Because of the popularity of our not-so-glowing Aperture review, we've prepared an addendum to our review to address some questions, concerns and misconceptions people had. There were three main streams of feedback about our initial review of Aperture. Some were the standard fare: e-mails accusing me and the Ars crew of being MS lackeys and that we've never given an Apple product a good review. That'sjustsilly. And as a fervent Mac user for 14 years now, I don't think the label fits me either. It has now become a running joke around here that I work for Microsoft.

Another bit of feedback was that we mentioned that Aperture is not a Photoshop competitor, yet we compare Aperture's features extensively with Photoshop's. This is a valid concern but according to Apple, Aperture is an "all-in-one post-production tool for photographers" and has "the most powerful image processing in the world." Sure, that's marketing speak but our job as reviewers is to put the lofty claims on the box to the test. Remember: we're on your side.

The third bit of feedback we got on the review was that it concentrated on the individual features without going into workflow enough. For many like myself, the bugs and lacking features made the rest of the application a bit of a nonstarter (and the workflow capability therefore irrelevant) since they were fundamental problems. Since Aperture is a workflow-oriented package, we're going spend more time looking at this aspect of the program. We're also going add some more RAW conversions from more professional cameras, so many potential users are covered.

Again, feel free to drop into the discussion with any personal experiences or questions you have.

Before we get into the workflow though, I just want to note a clarification on how the central library in Aperture works. Some people misinterpreted "there is only one location officially supported in Aperture" as meaning that the central database cannot be moved. What was meant by this is that you cannot have two or more concurrent databases in different locations. The one library can be moved though (as seen below) as long as it's not over a network.

Also, we mentioned that the database is a "bundle" or "package" file, which most Mac OS X users will be familiar with. A package is a folder that contains subfolders and files. That means you aren't at risk of corrupting the entire database in one shot. If you control click the .aplibrary file and select "Show Package Contents," an elaborate hierarchy including the original unedited RAW files from your camera are visible: